The field of communications has become increasingly important in today's society. In particular, the ability to quickly and effectively interact with an individual (through any suitable communications media) presents a significant obstacle for component manufacturers, system designers, and network operators. This obstacle is made even more difficult due to the plethora of diverse communication technologies that exist in the current marketplace.
As new communication architectures (such as session initiation protocol (SIP), for example) become available to the consumer, new protocols need to be developed in order to optimize this emerging technology. For example, one problem often encountered by endpoints is having calls dropped, torn down, or interrupted because some element or module presumes the call to be inactive. This mishandling of the call may primarily be due to an incorrect assumption about the state of the call: an assumption, which may have been based on a deficiency in signaling connections or paths. For example, a signaling pathway may be experiencing a problem, but that does not preclude the bearer path from still being functional. Performance suffers during these scenarios and participants can become frustrated because their calls are being incorrectly managed (i.e. dropped, interrupted, etc.). Accordingly, the issues in recognizing the current state of a call presents a significant challenge for any employee, employer, individual, or endpoint that seeks to execute a successful communication session.